One of the principles of DIY Marketing is this: Paint your mural without a frame.
For most of us, our talents, abilities, hobbies and passions could fill a wall. What we tend to do, though is put a frame around that part of the picture that we are either most comfortable with or have had prior success with. A resume or CV is like that frame. At best, it contains the work-related examples of our talent, not all of it.
If we step back and look at the whole picture, what do we see?
It may be more like a collage for some while others may see the Crayola nightmare of a kid's room. In either case, there are strokes of genius in those scribbles if we know how to use them. The scenes don't have to make sense together to be valuable, and it is important to think of the overall picture as a work-in-progress rather than a finished work.
One example of how to unleash success by looking away from the point of focus is Jeanne Rollins' Greedy Gracie.
Jeanne has a huge amount of energy and passion for what she does and it shows. When you meet her, she is bubbly and excited, eager to talk about giving. Her dream is to expand the conversation about giving to the whole world, and I believe she will do it.
What's the big deal about giving?
Well, that's the thing that intrigued me. Jeanne doesn't just talk about giving; she tells us that some of us are greedy about it, doing all the good ourselves and shutting others out of the fun of giving.
When Jeanne started talking about this, she developed a whole vocabulary of terms and catch phrases that were designed to create interest. Being a Greedy Giver is one of them. But people found it hard to understand them and remember them. They wanted examples to make these ideas "sticky".
As a family therapist, Jeanne couldn't tell stories about real people, and she knew people wouldn't value generalities, facts and figures, so she had to ditch the frame and look at the whole picture.
What she came up with was a character, Gracie, a lovable, giving character drawn from Jeanne's own experiences as a greedy giver.
Now, this is the part that takes a great idea and unleashes it. Jeanne needed Gracie to come to life, so she teamed up with Kathleen Jordan, the artistic talent that was missing from Jeanne's wall.
The musical
Kathy and Jeanne working together became a force to be reckoned with, and in less than a year, the duo have created a world that people can understand and a language that is changing behavior in a truly fun way.
You can check it out on GreedyGracie.com or Facebook and most likely in a card store near you. There is also a musical!
What is the secret?
The cliche of thinking outside the box doesn't begin to explain how we can trust our hidden talents, but removing the frame from the wall might be a better way to look at it. That's the first step, opening us up to possibilities that may seem too small to be practical.
What Jeanne did, though, was go one step further down that road of possibilities, and on that road she found Kathy. Joining two murals together makes a bigger and more interesting picture.
Oh, and it also creates new small corners of possibility that may be the roads they take in the future.
Good luck, ladies. You're on a roll.
